Twister (Two-Disc Special Edition) DVDReview

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The flying cows return, but is this re-release a full-force F5?

By IGN Staff

Twister is probably known far and wide as the movie that jump-started the disaster movie genre. If nothing else, it certainly pioneered nearly every aspect you see in disaster movies today. Heavy-duty special effects to portray the environmental menace du jour, a paper-thin plot to link all the big disaster scenes together, the good scientists vs. the evil scientists, etc. etc. etc. Hell, it even pioneered the copy-cat movie released near the same time: Tornado on Fox, starring Bruce Campbell. We might have moved on to Global Warming and Alien Invasion in the last several years, but nothing says "disaster nostalgia" like a hurricane tossing livestock through your living room window.

Basically, however, if you've seen one disaster movie, you've pretty much seen most of this story before. Basically it goes like this; a former storm chaser goes to find his ex-wife to sign the divorce papers, and gets caught up in a race with the evil corporate-sponsored storm chasers to test out a device that will analyze the tornado in great detail. Along the way, they rekindle their love, the evil storm chaser gets their just deserts, blah blah blah. It's not very compelling story.

But this movie wasn't a success because people wanted to go see a story brimming over with depth and subtlety and character development. Admit it, we all went to see this movie because it had flying cows. You know it's true. And that's when you knew you had to see it. Nothing can top a movie with flying cows. Except perhaps a movie with even more flying cows and perhaps a bull. Or maybe flying yaks. Oh yeah, the fact that it had some really cool looking tornadoes might have had something to do with your decision to see this movie, but we all wanted to see them flying cows.

The effects for the tornadoes remain fairly impressive, even today. Even though the CGI that is used liberally throughout this movie isn't exactly state of the art anymore, it's still highly believable and looks impressive enough (Although the edge of a tornado probably isn't so well defined in reality). I don't know how much I care for the tornadoes making animal noises though. While I'm sure the gurgling and growling endows it with an animalistic sense of malevolence, it just seems really silly when you sit there and listen for the sounds.

Of course you can't just have an endless string of tornadoes, no matter how cool a movie that might actually make. So in between we get to see interaction amongst the characters, which basically serves as motivation to make you say "Get to the flying cows, already!" or should you be past that part, you'd say "Show us more flying cows!" You see, the problem is that the characters in this movie aren't that great. Except for the two main characters, everyone is either two-dimensional stereotype stock character, or have the personality of a rock and only serve to say some lines that wouldn't make much sense coming out of someone else. Even amongst the characters that actually have something going for them (Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton), it isn't much. I can't tell if it's because the lines were just genuinely not that good or if Bill Paxton genuinely sucks, but man was he bad. His deliveries were just... ugh.

Still, this is a fun little ride while it lasts, and would probably have a little more impact if it weren't for the fact that nearly every disaster movie since has lifted the entire movie from it, and just crossed out the parts that said "tornado" and wrote in "volcano" or "meteor" or "flying cows." Oh wait, that last one hasn't been made yet.